The present invention relates generally to processing within a computing environment, and more specifically, to specifying the location of one or more sample instructions, each constituting a sample point, by address using run-time instrumentation.
Computer processors execute programs, or instruction streams, using increasingly complex branch prediction and instruction caching logic. These processes have been introduced to increase instruction throughput, and therefore processing performance. The introduction of logic for improving performance makes it difficult to predict with certainty how a particular software application will execute on the computer processor. During the software development process there is often a balance between functionality and performance. Software is executed at one or more levels of abstraction from the underlying hardware that is executing the software. When hardware is virtualized, an additional layer of abstraction is introduced. With the introduction of performance enhancing logic, and the various layers of abstraction it is difficult to have a thorough understanding of what is actually occurring at the hardware level when a program is executing. Without this information, software developers use more abstract methods, such as execution duration, memory usage, number of threads, etc., for optimizing the software application.
When hardware specific information is available, it is typically provided to a developer after the fact and it is provided in aggregate, at a high level, and/or interspersed with the activity of other programs, and the operating system, making it difficult to identify issues that may be impacting the efficiency and accuracy of the software application.